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The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel
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Published:
HarperAudio 2016
Accelerated Reader:
IL: UG - BL: 6.1 - AR Pts: 20
Status:
Checked Out
Description

he New York Times bestseller, now available in paperback—"an excellent, hyperliterate, genre-pantsing detective novel that deserves every inch of its...blockbuster superfame" (New York).

For sixty years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.

Homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. And in the cheap hotel where Landsman has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under his nose. When he begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy, word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, and Landsman finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, evil, and salvation that are his heritage.

At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.

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Format:
OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen
Edition:
Unabridged
Street Date:
07/05/2016
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780062640864
Accelerated Reader:
UG
Level 6.1, 20 Points
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APA Citation (style guide)

Michael Chabon. (2016). The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel. Unabridged HarperAudio.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Michael Chabon. 2016. The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel. HarperAudio.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel. HarperAudio, 2016.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Michael Chabon. The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel. Unabridged HarperAudio, 2016.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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The Yiddish Policemen's Union
fullDescription

he New York Times bestseller, now available in paperback—"an excellent, hyperliterate, genre-pantsing detective novel that deserves every inch of its...blockbuster superfame" (New York).

For sixty years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.

Homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. And in the cheap hotel where Landsman has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under his nose. When he begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy, word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, and Landsman finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, evil, and salvation that are his heritage.

At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.

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      • value: Grade 5
reviews
      • premium: True
      • source: AudioFile Magazine
      • content: It's hard to improve on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, but Michael Chabon tries admirably in his long awaited follow-up to THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY. While the prose may not quite match that of his earlier work and the ending is a bit disappointing, Chabon's latest is somewhat more accessible to the masses. It's a bit of a detective story mixed with a pungent commentary on the politics of Judaism and the State of Israel. Peter Riegert adeptly handles the numerous accents and inflections necessary to convey the life of Jewish refugees in a post-Holocaust homeland. Riegert not only uses timbre effectively, he does so while creating distinct and memorable personalities for Chabon's diverse cast. D.J.S. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        March 5, 2007


        Reviewed by
        Jess Walter
        They are the "frozen Chosen," two million people living, dying and kvetching in Sitka, Alaska, the temporary homeland established for displaced World War II Jews in Chabon's ambitious and entertaining new novel. It is—deep breath now—a murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller, so perhaps it's no surprise that, in the back half of the book, the moving parts become unwieldy; Chabon is juggling narrative chainsaws here.
        The novel begins—the same way that Philip Roth launched The Plot Against America
        —with a fascinating historical footnote: what if, as Franklin Roosevelt proposed on the eve of World War II, a temporary Jewish settlement had been established on the Alaska panhandle? Roosevelt's plan went nowhere, but Chabon runs the idea into the present, back-loading his tale with a haunting history. Israel failed to get a foothold in the Middle East, and since the Sitka solution was only temporary, Alaskan Jews are about to lose their cold homeland. The book's timeless refrain: "It's a strange time to be a Jew."
        Into this world arrives Chabon's Chandler-ready hero, Meyer Landsman, a drunken rogue cop who wakes in a flophouse to find that one of his neighbors has been murdered. With his half-Tlingit, half-Jewish partner and his sexy-tough boss, who happens also to be his ex-wife, Landsman investigates a fascinating underworld of Orthodox black-hat gangs and crime-lord rabbis. Chabon's "Alyeska" is an act of fearless imagination, more evidence of the soaring talent of his previous genre-blender, the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
        .
        Eventually, however, Chabon's homage to noir feels heavy-handed, with too many scenes of snappy tough-guy banter and too much of the kind of elaborate thriller plotting that requires long explanations and offscreen conspiracies.
        Chabon can certainly write noir—or whatever else he wants; his recent Sherlock Holmes novel, The Final Solution
        , was lovely, even if the New York Times Book Review
        sniffed its surprise that the mystery novel would "appeal to the real writer." Should any other snobs mistake Chabon for anything less than a real writer, this book offers new evidence of his peerless storytelling and style. Characters have skin "as pale as a page of commentary" and rough voices "like an onion rolling in a bucket." It's a solid performance that would have been even better with a little more Yiddish and a little less police. (May)

        Jess Walter was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award for
        The Zero and the winner of the 2006 Edgar Award for best novel for
        Citizen Vince.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        Starred review from March 1, 2007
        What's washed-up cop Meyer Landsman to do when a heroin-addicted, chess-crazed denizen of the dump where he lives gets plugged in the head? He's going to find the killer, and to that end he calls in his partner (and cousin) Berko Shemets, a bear of a man who's also half-Tlingit because, you see, this is]Alaska? In this wildly inventive blackest of black comedies, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chabon ("The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay") imagines that after World War II Roosevelt decreed the yet-to-be-50th state the homeland of the Jews. Years have passed, and the Jews have settled in very nicely, thank you, re-creating the aura of the Mitteleuropa they've lostthough the black-hatted, ultra-orthodox Bobovers turn out to be real thugs. The meddling of our two boys leads them straight to powerful and dangerous Bobover leader Rebbe Gold and eventually to a plot aimed at the reclamation of Israel. It also leads them into plenty of hot water with the top brass, including their new bossMeyer's ex-wife, Bina. Raucous, acidulous, decidedly impolite, yet stylistically arresting, this book is bloody brilliantand if it's way over the top, that's what makes Chabon such a great writer. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 1/07.]Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

        Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        Starred review from March 1, 2007
        Like Haruki Murakami in " Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" (1991), Chabon plays with the conventions of the Chandlerian private-eye novel, but that's only one ingredient in an epic-scale alternate-history saga of Jewish life since World War II. The premise draws on an obscure historical fact: FDR once proposed that Alaska, not Israel, become the homeland for Jews after the war. In Chabon's telling, that's exactly what happened, except, inevitably, it hasn't gone as planned: the U.S. government now has enacted a policy that will evict all Jews without proper papers from Sitka, the center of Jewish Alaska. In the midst of this nightmare, browbeaten police detective Meyer Landsman investigates the murder of a heroin-addicted chess prodigy who happens to be the disgraced son of Sitka's most powerful rabbi. No one wants this case solved, from Landsman's boss (his ex-wife, Bina) to the FBI, but our Yiddish Marlowe keeps digging, uncovering apocalypse in the making. Chabon manipulates his bulging plot masterfully, but what makes the novel soar is its humor and humanity. Even without grasping all the Yiddish wordplay that seasons the delectable prose, readers will fall headlong into the alternate universe of Chabon's Sitka, where black humor is a kind of antifreeze necessary to support life. And when Meyer, in the end, must "weigh the fates of the Jews, of the Arabs, of the whole unblessed and homeless planet" against a promise made to a grieving mother, it's clear that this parallel world smells a lot like home. Chabon's " Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" ran the book-award table in 2000, and this one just may be its equal.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)

      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        Starred review from June 25, 2007
        Chabon’s storytelling, in this alternate history of a world where Jews were settled in Alaska after World War II, is vivid enough, with inventive metaphors packed in like tapestry threads, but Peter Riegert’s versatile voice makes the invented society even more tangible. Told through the eyes of Meyer Landsman, a police detective investigating a murder, the novel occurs in a “strange time to be a Jew,” as several characters ruefully put it: the special Jewish district will soon be controlled by Alaska again. In a bonus interview on the last disc, Chabon relates his desire to write about a place where Yiddish was an official language. The book is shot through with Yiddish phrases and names, which melodically roll off Riegert’s tongue. He gives Landsman and his tough but warmhearted partner Berko similar yet distinct gruff voices that contrast well with the effeminate-sounding sect leader and the Southern-accented Americans who come to start the land reversion process. Riegert’s pacing increases the enjoyment of this expertly spun mystery. Simultaneous release with the HarperCollins hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 5).

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shortDescription

he New York Times bestseller, now available in paperback—"an excellent, hyperliterate, genre-pantsing detective novel that deserves every inch of its...blockbuster superfame" (New York).

For sixty years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.

Homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. And in the cheap hotel where Landsman has washed up,...

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